The work aims to define the relational concepts that underlie two-year-old children's knowledge of where around a verb to situate the nouns that, in the adult language, serve as the subjects, objects, indirect objects, etc., of the verb. That is, in the two-year-old, what relationships does a noun have to have to the action for it to be placed before the verb, after the verb, or in some preposition-marked case relation to the verb? Ignorance of these conceptual-syntactic correspondences has been the major stumbling-block to understanding the early stages of language development. The method will be to compare two-year-olds' spontaneous imitations of model sentences in which the consitituent phrases are in the normal order with their imitations of models with inverted constituent order. (A recent study using this technique shows that where a two-year-old has a preferred order of constituents, he has a strong tendency to re-order models that are to him mal-ordered.) A series of studies will use this technique to find out what factors control the child's order preferences, varying the type of verb and the semantic relation of the noun to the verb.